The Sleeper Agent
by radredknuxfan
Summary: After another defeat at the hands of the penguins, Dr. Blowhole reveals that he's secretly reprogrammed one of the penguins to serve him. No one believes him at first, but when missions start to fail, Skipper's paranoia starts to get the best of him, and it drives a wedge between the team. Will they be able to survive this? Two-shot. Please R&R! Thanks! COMPLETE
1. Chapter 1

It was late inside Dr. Blowhole's lair, and the owner of said lair was lying on the floor, having just been knocked off of his scooter after a pitched battle between him and the penguins.

However, while most evil villains would be busy cursing the hero and telling them that the battle wasn't over, Dr. Blowhole had a different idea.

"Give it up, Blowhole! We'll never let you release that toxic gas over the city!" said Skipper as he stood triumphantly with the rest of his team.

To Skipper's surprise, though, Blowhole started cackling, knowing that he had a backup plan already up his sleeve should his original plan fail.

"Shouldn't he be retreating right about now, Skipper?" whispered Kowalski.

Skipper shushed him before turning back towards the evil dolphin, who by then had finished laughing.

"What the heck were you laughing about, Blowhole? We beat you…again."

"Do you really think that you've beaten me? An evil genius always has a backup plan, you know."

Skipper looked at him in confusion as two of Blowhole's lobster minions pushed him back on to his scooter.

"What kind of backup plan are we talking about here? If it puts the city in danger, we're gonna make sure that it doesn't happen."

"Oh believe me; it has nothing to do with the city. It has more to do with you four."

Surprised, the four penguins dropped their guards.

"Us? What do you mean by us?" asked Private.

"It's simple, really. I know that it's quite difficult for me to be able to defeat you with the four of you working as a team. So, I thought, why not break them up? I knew that would be tough to do, however, but I have managed to figure out the perfect way to do so."

Blowhole fell silent for a moment to take in the penguins' incredulous looks before continuing on.

"I've secretly reprogrammed one of you to work for me. All I have to do is say one little word, and they're completely under my control."

The room fell silent for another few seconds before Blowhole spoke up once more.

"I see from the looks on your faces that what I've said seems to have done the trick. If you'll excuse me, I've got some more evil plans to create. Ta-ta!"

Skipper barely noticed Blowhole extending the 'e' on the word evil, as he was completely lost in thought. Before he could get any more lost, though, Private walked up to him.

"Skippah, you don't believe what Dr. Blowhole said, do you?"

"Of course not! Why would I ever believe something that comes out of the mouth of my arch enemy?"

Skipper adopted a confident expression, hoping that Private wouldn't be able to tell that he was dodging the question. In reality, he wasn't so sure.

He obviously trusted his team with his life, but with his rampant paranoia, even the smallest seeds of doubt can grow into something much bigger.

Sighing, he turned towards his team.

"Let's move out, men! Looks like Blowhole won't be bothering us for now."

As the penguins headed out the door to go back to the zoo, Blowhole couldn't resist another evil laugh, knowing that he's already said the trigger word and it was only a matter of time before the team was no more.

* * *

The next day came, and Skipper woke up the rest of the penguins for morning training as usual. However, when the others hopped down from their beds, he found Kowalski hunched over, an annoyed look on his face.

"Something wrong, Kowalski?"

"Sorry, Skipper. I've just had a bit of trouble sleeping. I seem to be suffering from some sort of headache, possibly from that wrench I got hit with yesterday."

Skipper initially wasn't sure if Kowalski was making excuses, but then he remembered seeing one of Blowhole's lobsters specifically hit Kowalski with a wrench.

"Go find some aspirin, and quickly. I want you all up topside as soon as possible."

Kowalski saluted before heading to his lab, knowing that he had some in stock to use as part of some experiments.

A few minutes later, Kowalski returned from the lab looking good as new.

"Ready to go, Skipper."

"Good, now let's go. Time's a wastin'."

* * *

Once the zoo finally closed, Rico, Kowalski and Private were about to head down into the HQ for some free time. However, they were interrupted when Skipper cleared his throat.

"Hold up there for a second, boys. I have a little surprise for you."

The other three penguins turned around to face their commander, watching expectantly as they wondered what he had in mind.

"I think we need to have a bit of a celebration for successfully preventing Blowhole from releasing his toxic gas all over the city, so I'm treating you all to snow cones."

"Ooh, that sounds wonderful, Skippah!" said Private, beaming.

Skipper looked at the other penguins for a moment, seeing Rico's beak start to water, and Kowalski look pleasantly surprised.

"Let's go find us a snow cone cart."

The penguins immediately hopped out of the habitat, sliding around as they searched for an unattended snow cone cart.

Eventually, they managed to find one, but they ended up having to go all the way into the park to do so. Still, none of them could really complain, as the snow cones themselves would still be very worth it.

The penguins quickly slid into a bush nearby, and Skipper turned towards Rico.

"Rico, binoculars."

Rico spit up a pair of binoculars as asked, and Skipper held them up to his eyes, searching around for anyone in the vicinity.

"No sign of any humans. We should be safe."

"We should probably work quickly, though. There's no telling when the human who pushes that cart will return." pointed out Kowalski.

"Noted. Come on, let's move."

The penguins slid over, stopping right in front of the cart.

"Attack stack, men!"

The penguins stacked up on top of each other, but the sudden nature of the stack led to Kowalski, who was on the bottom, to accidentally move forward a few feet as he tried to regain his balance.

"Kowalski, what's going on down there? We're too far away!" said Skipper as he looked down at the stack under him.

"Apologies, Skipper. My center of gravity was thrown off for a bit. Give me a second to fix this."

Kowalski attempted to try and straighten himself out so that he would be able to bring the stack back to the snow cone cart, but it was already too late, as the analyst tripped over his feet, and the other penguins were sent flying into a small pond a few feet away from the cart.

The momentum also ended up carrying Kowalski into the pond as well, and as the four penguins tried to pick themselves up and try again, the proprietor of the snow cone cart returned, grabbing said cart and wheeling it away.

"After those snow cones!" yelled Skipper.

Getting out of the pond, however, proved to be challenging. It was too shallow for them to swim efficiently, so they were forced to waddle their way out, which slowed them down.

Eventually, though, they did manage to get out of the pond, and they immediately dropped down to their bellies, giving chase. Unfortunately, the next time the human stopped was within a crowd of people, and as the penguins watched the man sell snow cones to everyone, Skipper knew there was no chance they would be able to catch him unaware and get snow cones.

Sighing in defeat, Skipper turned towards the rest of the team.

"Let's head back to the zoo, men. Looks like we're out of luck."

"But Skippah, can't we just look around and see if there's another cart somewhere?" asked Private.

"Private does have a point." said Kowalski.

"Alright, fine. Let's work quickly, though. I don't want to leave the HQ unattended more than we need to."

The penguins once again started searching through Central Park, combing through the park itself, as well as the zoo as they desperately tried to find another snow cone cart.

However, the search came up empty, and when the penguins finally returned to their HQ in defeat, Skipper rounded on Kowalski.

"What happened out there, Kowalski? We've always performed the Attack Stack perfectly!"

Caught off guard by the sudden questions, Kowalski blanched for a moment before sputtering out an answer.

"I-I'm sorry, Skipper! I didn't mean to drop you guys. I just didn't expect that you would want to use that method. Besides, don't we usually use a different way for getting snow cones?"

Skipper opened his beak to argue, but then he realized that Kowalski did have a point. He remembered specifically using the boost method the last few times they did go for snow cones. Sighing, he looked down at the ground for a moment before returning to facing Kowalski.

"Sorry I doubted you for a minute there, Kowalski. Just...do you remember what I said that one time, about expecting the unexpected?"

Kowalski nodded, choosing to let Skipper speak.

"Well, this is exactly what I meant when I said that! We can't simply go with the methods that we're used to. We've got to shake it up some times. Otherwise we'll be too predictable! Do you understand?"

"Yes, Skipper, I understand."

"Good."

Despite the niggling feeling in the back of his mind that something was wrong, Skipper trusted Kowalski and knew that he would never intentionally sabotage a mission. Unintentionally sabotaging a mission was a different story, though, but Skipper knew those were only because of Kowalski's inventions being more dangerous than they should.

As he watched the other penguins go through their normal routines during their free time, Skipper wondered if there was even a possibility that one of them could have secretly been reprogrammed, like Blowhole said. As much as it annoyed him that he didn't immediately doubt the validity of what Blowhole said, he knew that there was no limit to what the mad scientist was capable of.

"How could he have even gotten close to us? The security system would have warned us." he thought to himself.

Sitting down at the table, he put his head into his flippers, feeling a headache coming on.


	2. Chapter 2

After giving it some thought, Skipper decided it was best for them to just move on and hope that the failed snow cone raid was simply an off day for them.

However, it wasn't the case, as they continued to fail mission after mission, and although none of them were threatening the safety of the city, it was starting to wear on Skipper's nerves.

After returning to the HQ from a mission where they were trying to rescue Mort from the garbage dump, Skipper rounded on the three other penguins, adopting an angry look on his face while trying to ignore the smell that was radiating off of the four of them.

"Alright, somebody needs to tell me right now if they're hiding something! This is the fourth mission in a row that one of you has screwed up, and I'm tired of it!"

Skipper sighed before continuing to speak, this time in a much softer tone.

"I thought I trained you guys well. We're supposed to be an elite force, and here I see you guys making rookie mistakes."

As Skipper continued to speak, he looked at Kowalski, who was surprised to be singled out so quickly.

"Kowalski…I'm positive that we've already went through this before, but you need to keep your mind on the mission in front of you. Being as distracted as you are is only going to lead to more trouble for us."

"I'm sorry, sir. I don't know what's gotten into me recently."

Skipper stared at Kowalski for a few moments before moving on, turning to face both Private and Rico.

"And you two! I can't spend all my time keeping an eye on the rest of you. You need to take the initiative sometimes and fix some of the mistakes that might come up, especially with what's been going on recently."

Although Kowalski wasn't entirely happy with the pointed look Skipper gave him after that last sentence, he chose to remain silent as he didn't want to irk Skipper even further. However, Private didn't have the same idea.

"I'm sorry, Skippah, but do you really think that I wouldn't be paying close attention to what everyone else was doing? I mean, that is kind of the basis of being a team, you know!"

Skipper stared at Private for a moment, slightly taken aback by the tone Private had when addressing him. Instead of immediately apologizing, though, Private held his expression steady, glaring at Skipper.

"What the heck's gotten into you, Private?" asked Kowalski as he looked on from off to the side.

Unfortunately, he didn't get an answer, as both penguins glared at him, forcing him to keep his mouth shut.

"So Rico, do you have anything to say for yourself?" asked Skipper as he turned towards the weapons expert.

At first, Skipper was expecting Rico to be babbling an apology, but when he met eyes with the weapons expert, he saw that Rico had a baseball bat in his flipper, which he was waving menacingly.

After backing out of Rico's reach, Skipper soon realized that he was falling straight into Blowhole's hands by letting the issues between the team get this far. As much as it annoyed him to fall into the dolphin's trap, he knew that he needed to keep the team together at all costs, so after he shook his head to clear his mind, he began speaking.

"I see what's going on. Blowhole made that whole story about a sleeper agent up so that he could break us apart! There's no way he could have reprogrammed one of us without the alarm going off."

However, his explanation went unheard, as Private and Rico were already fighting, both of them thinking that the other was the agent. Kowalski, though, was more rational, and he went over to break up the fighting.

Annoyed, Skipper finally decided that he had enough of dealing with these kinds of squabbles, so after grabbing a whistle that he had on the table near him, he placed it into his beak and blew hard, successfully breaking the melee apart.

"Knock it off, you two!"

Private and Rico soon separated, the two of them looking noticeably cowed as they tried to avoid looking at the angry commander.

"Now, as much as I want to punish you two, I know that it's not your faults that this has gone as far as it has."

Both penguins were noticeably surprised that they got off as lightly as they did, but a glare from the commander forced them to return to their nonplussed looks as they focused on what Skipper had to say.

"You see, we're focusing all of this misplaced anger on the wrong person, being each other. What we should be doing is focusing all of our anger on Blowhole and make sure that he doesn't try this again. What do you guys think?"

Only Kowalski replied in the affirmative, as when Skipper looked over at the other two penguins, he saw that they were still glaring at each other. They did reply as well, though, once Skipper cleared his throat to catch their attention and coerce them into doing so.

With Skipper comfortable enough that the team was mostly well together, he led them towards the entrance to the escape tunnels, and they made their way towards Hoboken and the lair of Dr. Blowhole.

* * *

The trip to Blowhole's lair was pretty much silent, considering there was still the issue of Private and Rico not trusting each other, but Skipper was more interested in getting to the lair more than trying to get them to make up.

Eventually, after what felt like forever, the team finally reached the Hoboken Zoo, and once they made it to the door into Blowhole's lair, Skipper kicked the door open and burst through.

It didn't take long before they were immediately surrounded by Blowhole's lobsters, and the dolphin himself came soon after, playfully leaning over on his Segway once he reached the four of them.

"What a surprise, Skipper! I figured that you would want to come back for another visit. So, how are things?"

Instead of answering, Skipper walked over to the edge of the circle of lobsters, grabbing one and throwing it into Blowhole's face. While Blowhole was busy recovering from the brazen attack, Skipper finally spoke up, anger lacing his voice.

"I'm not here to talk, Blowhole. Now, tell us that you were lying about reprogramming one of us, or I will make sure that you never make that mistake again."

Rather than be intimidated by Skipper's threats, Blowhole simply laughed, catching the commander off guard.

"Now Skipper, do you really think that I would lie to you about something like that? I assure you that I have successfully reprogrammed one of you without you knowing."

Skipper was confused. As much as he wanted to go on believing that Blowhole was lying, he knew that the evidence for Kowalski being the sleeper agent was pretty damning. Still, since it was probably best not to go out and accuse Kowalski without any real proof, he decided just to play along.

"So, if you actually are telling the truth, and one of us is a sleeper agent, how about you tell me who it is before I knock your teeth in?"

Skipper adopted his battle stance to emphasize his new threat, but once again Blowhole didn't fall for it, instead adopting a menacing look.

"I don't have to."

Skipper barely had enough time to process what that meant when he sensed something quickly coming towards him. Stepping aside, he grabbed the offending animal and flipped it over his shoulder, his beak falling open in shock as he saw who was currently on the ground in front of him.

"Private?"

It was indeed Private, who was attempting to adopt a menacing look, but the blank stare in the young penguin's eyes gave away the fact that he was being controlled.

Skipper didn't know what to think. He had no idea how to process the fact that the penguin that he treated almost like a son was now working for the enemy, even unwillingly.

Through the mess of thoughts running through his head, one thing came to Skipper's mind.

"How? How did you do it, Blowhole?" he asked as he stared in shock at the scene in front of him.

Blowhole cackled before finally answering Skipper's question.

"It's easy. Do you remember that time when Kowalski was repairing the security system in your little shack?"

"Wait…how did you know that our security system was down?" asked Kowalski.

"Well, since you had surveillance on me, I figured I'd return the favor."

Blowhole took a moment to look at the surprised faces on the three penguins before continuing on.

"Anyway, when you all were asleep, I had Red One sneak into your base and plant a chip on your little friend here. And as I've mentioned before, it's voice activated. Oh, how I love technology sometimes…"

Skipper was still going through a mess of emotions as he listened to Blowhole speak, but he eventually settled on anger. Yelling in rage, he ran forward, bouncing off of one of the lobsters and head-butting Blowhole in the chest.

When the two of them landed on the floor, Skipper began punching Blowhole as hard as he could. Both the lobsters and Private attempted to stop him. Kowalski and Rico came in to intercept, but their reluctance to hurt Private made it tough for them.

"Don't do this, Private! You can fight it!" said Kowalski as he attempted to break through the control Blowhole had on him, but it was no use.

Rico, though, had no issues with fighting Private if it meant saving him. So, after a few minutes of battling, when the two of them ended up next to each other in the middle of their battles, they silently agreed to focus on one thing each.

So, as Rico kept Private busy, and Kowalski took on all of the lobsters, Blowhole was busy trying to defend himself from Skipper's assault. However, with the blind rage Skipper was in, Blowhole could barely manage to block most of his shots.

Eventually, even someone like Blowhole knew when it was best to just give up.

"Stop! Stop, I give up!"

Skipper wasn't listening, though, so Kowalski was forced to pull Skipper off of Blowhole and knock him out with a chop to the throat.

As Skipper passed out on the floor, Blowhole somehow managed to pick himself up despite all of the pain he was going through.

"Help me up on to my Segway if you want me to remove the chip inside your friend."

As Blowhole held out one of his flippers, Kowalski carefully watched him, wondering if he was going to double cross them again. As he looked behind him, though, he saw that Rico had Private pinned under him, and he knew that the reprogrammed penguin would be no threat anymore.

So, sighing, he and a couple of the lobsters helped push Dr. Blowhole back on to his Segway, and the doctor made his way towards one of the operating tables.

"Bring him over here. I'll remove the chip."

"You'd better not be lying to us, Blowhole. I won't hold Skipper back next time."

"Don't worry, I'm not. Frankly, I'd rather not have to deal with him in that state again."

Despite the look Blowhole had on his face, Kowalski was willing to trust him, and he and Rico brought Private over to the doctor.

* * *

Skipper woke up a little while later, nearly conking his head on the top of his bunk as he jumped up in surprise, realizing that he was in a different place from when he was knocked out.

After a few more minutes of confusion, Skipper realized that he was back in the HQ, and when he sat up, he found that Kowalski was already next to him.

"Oh good, you're awake! Sorry I had to knock you out, Skipper. You probably would have ended up killing Blowhole if I didn't jump in."

"What happened?" he asked, his mind still a little hazy.

"Blowhole removed the chip from Private. Turns out it was inside his earhole. The operation was a little messy, but he's fine."

Skipper looked around in confusion for a moment before his eyes landed on Private, who had a smile on his face.

"Are you alright, Private? Nothing odd going on with you?"

"Right as rain, Skippah! I had to rest up a bit after the removal, but I'm ready to go!"

Skipper didn't answer immediately, overcome with emotion. Eventually, he grabbed Private in a nearly bone crushing hug.

"I'm so glad you're okay, Private. I was so worried when I found out that Blowhole got you."

"Don't worry, Skippah, I'm fine. Now, can you please let go? I can't breathe."

Skipper willingly let Private go before turning towards Kowalski, a smile on his face.

"So I just wanted to make sure. You're definitely okay, Kowalski? Blowhole hasn't reprogrammed you, has he?"

"No sir. I was just distracted by trying to figure out how he got in."

"Good. Now come on, let's go have some fun for once."

With a new lease on life, the penguins hopped out of their HQ, happy that one of the most difficult times of their lives was now over.


End file.
